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Its all lies until he shows the evidence. I can say Windows infringes on the GPL all I want, but until I say exactly what it is its all just a lie. I know nothing about the kernel, nor have I seen it or Windows source code so I cannot say whether or not that it does. I think Microsoft should be held accountable for saying statements like that with no evidence, that would be slander to any other business, so why not when its Microsoft?

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Well f*cking said. And you know the reason why they can continue spouting bull from their mouth? It's because M$ has the money to buy off any judge that has a thing to say in such a lawsuit. There, I said it.

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I'm surprised to see that Novell thinks enough of the community to make this statement, and I think it shows that they are aware how much of a problem this partnership is to them now. I just can't understand how they could have ever thought this deal would be good for a company in their position... it makes me think that the people in charge of that company are only interested in profits, and Microsoft's money spends just like everyone else's. The problem is that Microsoft's money comes with lots of strings attached.

Some people (probably the more level-headed of the community I might add) say that Mark Shuttleworth's recent offer to SuSE developers is not good for the GNU/Linux community as a whole. While there is some bit of "truth" there, I can't say that I agree.

The problem isn't Mark Shuttleworth (or anyone else in the Linux community) trying to create a benefit for their project out of the Microsoft/Novell deal... the problem is THE DEAL ITSELF. It was obvious that this deal would create fighting within the community, and this is exactly what Microsoft wants. And now today I read that Novell will fork OpenOffice... so they can add support for Microsoft's replacement for the Open Document Format! I can't believe that Novell thinks this will go over well with the Open Source community. Shuttleworth was right to make the offer... everyone knows there has to be numerous SuSE developers steaming over what their corporate executives have done over the last week or two. After all, they are part of Open Source community themselves. If those developers are serious about supporting open standards (like ODF), then why would they possibly feel the need to include Microsoft's replacement for ODF (OpenXML) in one of the most popular open-source applications available? I'm sure SuSE will see a rather large decrease in developers within the next couple of months, and they may as well go to a distribution that could never be put in the same situation as SuSE is currently.

Microsoft wouldn't have ever been able to make such a deal with a community-driven distribution like Debian and its derivatives. Yes, Ubuntu has a company behind it that pays developers and makes money from supporting the distribution, but that company and it's leader are completely commited to Open-Source ideals (not making their shareholders happy... there are none), and money is not an issue (it has been stated numerous times by Shuttleworth that even if Canonical doesnt' make any money from Ubuntu, the distribution will continue), and at Ubuntu's core is Debian... arguably the most community-driven non-proprietary open-source distribution out there (ok, this one is my thoughts.. not necessary fact ).

Microsoft is at it again. They've caused more problems for open-source recently by very successfully playing off the biggest problem that the Open-Source community as a whole has... fractioning into smaller groups. The more fractioned the community is, the easier it is for a corporate monopoly to push their agenda and cause problems for those who would like to see more choices. Maybe this whole situation will cause the Open-Source community as a whole to rethink how this thing works. I don't know if this means cutting down on the number of distributions (instead possibly making LSB encompass more about the OS), desktop environments (thank god for the Portland project), or choices in every possible aspect of today's Linux distribution (package management and binary compatibility needs to be standard in my opinion), but I for one am ready for such a discussion as well as an associated change that makes GNU/Linux a stronger competitor and better replacement to proprietary offerings than it is now.

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The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls "a mistake" which will be "damaging to Novell's success in the future."

His main issue with the deal, though, is "that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence, it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally." He leaves the company at the end of this month. He explained why in a message sent to several Novell email lists, and the message included his letter to management: